Internet2 and NLR merger moves forward

There could be some minor delays, but it looks like Internet2 and National Lambda Rail will really merge this time around.

Soon after Jeffery Lehman was asked to serve as the new Internet2 chair in January he says he received a call from Tracy Futhey, the National Lambda Rail chair, to see if he “wanted to take a fresh look at the idea of a merger.”

And that’s how this most recent effort to join Internet2 and NLR got underway.

Over the years the two groups have morphed into more similar organizations, which is one of the reasons why it makes more sense to merge today than in years past. According to NLR’s spokeswoman, “NLR was founded as an owned optical network and did primarily Layer 1 interconnections with regional academic networks and specialized groups of researchers. Internet2 has traditionally focused on providing a stable Layer 3 platform.”

But in recent years both organizations started offering Layer 1, 2 and 3 services to the research community as well as optical interconnections. Because of these similarities, the groups are trying their hand at a merger again.

Lehman and Futhey presented a summary of the groups’ efforts to merge at the Internet2 Spring 2007 Member Meeting in Arlington, Va., on Tuesday.

In March the chairs presented a memorandum of agreement to their respective organizations. The agreement includes a framework for merging Internet2 and NLR to create an organization that will be called Internet2 National Lambda Rail, Lehman says. The agreement includes a timeline for creating this organization.

The goal of the new group will be to “not just simply offer a fee for service utility,” Lehman says. It will be a “member organization dedicated to the public good of research and education communities,” he says.

Lehman and Futhey first established a network planning team with the goal of evaluating each organization’s network architectures and what it would take to bring those architectures together. There is also a network resource team in place that is reviewing capacity excesses the joined networks might have.